JD Vance Quotes

When people read Breitbart every single day and convince themselves that Barack Obama is a foreign terrorist, that is not a problem of government. That is a problem of community failure, and we have to recognize that.

We’ll get fired for tardiness, or for stealing merchandise and selling it on eBay, or for having a customer complain about the smell of alcohol on our breath, or for taking five thirty-minute restroom breaks per shift. We talk about the value of hard work but tell ourselves that the reason we’re not working is some perceived unfairness: Obama shut down the coal mines, or all the jobs went to the Chinese. These are the lies we tell ourselves to solve the cognitive dissonance — the broken connection between the world we see and the values we preach.

We have built a foreign policy of hectoring and moralizing and lecturing countries that don't want anything to do with this. The Chinese have a foreign policy of building roads and bridges and feeding poor people, and I think that we should pursue a foreign policy, a diplomacy, of respect and a foreign policy that is not rooted in moralizing; it is rooted in the national interests of this country.

Lindsay was a teenager...at the height of that weird mixture of thinking you know everything and caring too much about how others perceive you.

Manliness meant strength, courage, a willingness to fight, and, later, success with girls. Boys who got good grades were “sissies” or “faggots.” I don’t know where I got this feeling.

The fallen world described by the Christian religion matched the world I saw around me: one where a happy car ride could quickly turn to misery, one where individual misconduct rippled across a family’s and a community’s life. When I asked Mamaw if God loved us, I asked her to reassure me that this religion of ours could still make sense of the world we lived in. I needed reassurance of some deeper justice, some cadence or rhythm that lurked beneath the heartache and chaos.

But experience can be a difficult teacher, and it taught me that this story of economic insecurity is, at best, incomplete.

What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives. Yet the message of the right is increasingly: It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault. My

They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many of them are raised by wolves.” I

...Mom equated money with affection...but I never cared about the money. I just wanted her to be healthy.

despite all of the environmental pressures from my neighborhood and community, I received a different message at home. And that just might have saved me.

both of my grandparents had an almost religious faith in hard work and the American Dream. Neither was under any illusions that wealth or privilege didn’t matter in America. On politics, for example, Mamaw had one opinion — “They’re all a bunch of crooks” — but Papaw became a committed Democrat. He had no problem with Armco, but he and everyone like him hated the coal companies in Kentucky thanks to a long history of labor strife. So, to Papaw and Mamaw, not all rich people were bad, but all bad people were rich. Papaw was a Democrat because that party protected the working people.

Sounds like we got some fans and some haters.

President Obama came on the scene right as so many people in my community began to believe that the modern American meritocracy was not built for them. We know we’re not doing well. We see it every day: in the obituaries for teenage kids that conspicuously omit the cause of death (reading between the lines: overdose), in the deadbeats we watch our daughters waste their time with. Barack Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities. He is a good father while many of us aren’t. He wears suits to his job while we wear overalls, if we’re lucky enough to have a job at all. His wife tells us that we shouldn’t be feeding our children certain foods, and we hate her for it — not because we think she’s wrong but because we know she’s right.

One way our upper class can promote upward mobility, then, is not only by pushing wise public policies but by opening their hearts and minds to the newcomers who don’t quite belong.